Tigerheart (25 page)

The Boy spit in the palm of his hand, said “Agreed,” and held it out for Paul to do likewise. Paul spit into his own palm, joined hands with The Boy, and shook firmly, as Mary dozed peacefully in the arms of her new big brother.

Chapter 21

Why the Window Was Barred

W
e now return, at long last, to Paul’s home, where things were not at all as Paul had left them.

The cleaning woman had found Colleen Dear the morning after Paul’s abrupt departure, lying upon Paul’s bed as if she were one dead. She was staring straight up at nothing, and her arms were crisscrossed on her breasts. The poor cleaning woman tried to get her to stir, tried to get some sort of response from her. The missing boy was quickly noted, and the police summoned. But there were no clues, except a slightly dented pot. The police in turn summoned Paul’s father, Patrick. It is tragic to report that in such cases, departed fathers are often the first suspects when their children go missing. But Patrick’s conscience was clear, naturally. He answered every question the police asked, his small apartment was searched in vain for some sign of the lad. So although the police still looked at him a bit suspiciously, he was to all intents and purposes eliminated as a potential suspect.

With his son missing and his wife unable to attend to herself, Patrick opted to stay with the insensate Colleen. She was of no use in providing hints as to where Paul might have gone. But that did not stop Patrick from speaking to her constantly, as if she could hear him. He talked of their time together, and their shared life, and of how much he still loved her and wished that they could remain together. And most of all, he kept reassuring her that somehow, in some way, Paul would return to them.

There was one point when Patrick thought that he was getting through to her. Late one night, as he sat in a rocking chair next to her bed, he thought he heard her whisper something. He leaned forward. “What was that, darling? What did you say?”

“I believe,” she whispered, and then fell silent once more. All Patrick’s attempts to coax more words from her ended in failure, so his brief surge of hope was terribly dashed.

The only other sign he got from Colleen was when he tried to relocate her to their bedroom. Her body went from limp to resistant, from supple to rock hard, and he quickly understood that on some fundamental level, she absolutely refused to move from Paul’s room. So he had made no further effort to challenge it. Night after night she lay upon Paul’s narrow bed while Patrick resigned himself to sleeping as well as he could in the rocking chair he had pulled into the room.

And then one night, Patrick was downstairs making tea when he heard what sounded like burglars coming in through the second-story window, the one that led into Paul’s room…the room in which Colleen had taken up residence. Grabbing the closest weapon he could find, which was a butter knife, Patrick sprinted up the stairs, two at a time. He darted into Paul’s room and froze in the doorway.

Colleen was on her feet, her eyes wide and focused, staring at the open window. Standing on the sill was Paul, cradling a small, blanketed bundle in his arms.

No one moved, not so much as an inch. Patrick had to pinch himself to make certain that he hadn’t fallen asleep in his rocking chair and was dreaming this. Once he had ascertained that he was awake, he was then afraid to make the slightest move, lest he shatter the fragile tableau and send Paul back off to wherever he’d fled to and now just returned from.

Paul looked nervously from one parent to the other, and then extended the bundle toward them. “I brought her for you, mother. For us.”

Colleen took one slow step toward him, then another, looking as if her legs were trembling, but then gaining strength with every move closer to her son.

“I believed,” she whispered, and suddenly she was across the room and clutching her son to her. She sobbed his name over and over, and she scolded him fiercely for terrifying her while at the same time apologizing profusely for everything she had ever done or might have done or might ever do that could make Paul think, even for a moment, that a mother was something you ran from rather than ran toward. Paul tried to speak but was not able to, overwhelmed by that knot-in-your-stomach feeling one usually gets when one’s mother is crying for whatever reason. Moments later Patrick had joined them, lifting his son down off the windowsill, the three of them embracing and promising that they would never, ever, ever be apart.

The baby, who was becoming well and truly smothered from all the hugging, let out a yelp of protest. Colleen stepped back and took the infant in her arms, looking at her in wide-eyed wonderment. “Paul…where did this child come from? And—good heavens, look! The poor thing is missing a hand!”

“I’m sorry about that,” Paul said. “I wanted her to be perfect, but this was the best one I could find there.”

“There? There where?”

He took a deep breath, let it out, and said, “The Anyplace. That’s where I went. The Anyplace, brought there by a pixie to find a new baby sister to replace Bonnie,” and steeled himself for his mother’s immediate repudiation of the very notion of such a thing.

Colleen stared at the child, who in some ways reminded her very much of what she herself looked like when she was a baby. Then she turned to Patrick, who simply shrugged. Finally, to Paul’s utter astonishment, she said firmly, “Of course you did. Where else would she have come from, and would you have gone, save the Anyplace?” She paused, and then added, “Paul, understand: No one could ever replace Bonnie in my heart, nor you. Nevertheless, this is a beautiful little girl, hand or no, and she clearly does need a mother.”

“And she’s not the only one,” Paul said, barely able to keep the triumph out of his voice. “Boy!” he said, turning toward the window. “I know you’re out there! We had a wager, Boy, and you have lost! Come in and meet your new mother and father!”

There was a long pause, and then to Patrick’s utter shock, a young lad stepped through, dressed in garments that seemed plucked from impossibly green trees. He recognized him instantly.

“You,” he whispered.

The Boy drew himself up and, although he did not drop his suspicious attitude, nevertheless bowed grandly as he had seen other gentlemen do. “I have to be going,” he said abruptly.

This shocked and angered Paul, as he said, “Wait! You can’t! We had a bargain!”

“Did we?” The Boy said carelessly. “Can’t say as I recall it.”

“You lie!”

“Never.”

“What do you mean, never! You are half brother to the trickster god Coyote, first cousin to Puck, grandnephew of Loki. You lie all the time!”

“Half brother of…” Paul’s father, who had looked stunned, seemed to be recovering. He almost laughed at Paul’s recitation of The Boy’s proclaimed lineage. “Is
that
what you’ve told him, Boy?”

Not perceiving his father’s amusement, Paul said with a wounded tone, “Yes, he did. So maybe I should have known”—he turned back to The Boy—“that you were lying when you said you’d allow my mother and father to adopt you! That you’d—”

“What? Trust them?” The Boy said. “Have you learned nothing from adults? From me? From my warnings of what you can expect? Maybe not today, but sooner or later.”

“I know, I know what you said! How you flew away from home, and when you returned, your parents had shut the window against you. That they’d forgotten about you. But my parents are different”—and he gestured toward them. “Can’t you see? They can love you, tend to you. My mother can be your mother, my father your—”

“No.” It was Patrick who had spoken, and there was unutterable sadness in his voice. “No, Paul. I can never be his father.”

Paul looked at his dad in shock. The Boy smirked and said, “See? Now do you understand?”

“No, he doesn’t,” said Patrick. “And neither do you.”

“What do you mean?” The Boy looked with renewed suspicion at Patrick. “Why do you look at me that way?”

“Because I know that you’re wrong. I know that your mother didn’t shut the window to keep you out.”

“And how do you know that?” said The Boy.

To which Patrick replied with infinite tenderness, “She didn’t shut the window to keep you out, Boy. She shut the window to keep me
in,
because I was so desperate to follow you. Even as an infant, I tried on three separate occasions to escape out the window after you. So she kept it shut until I grew up. Don’t you see, Boy? I’m your baby brother.”

The Boy gripped the edge of the window frame. “You—you lie,” he said, suddenly feeling short of breath. Paul was looking from The Boy to his father in amazement, seeing now resemblances that he wondered why he’d never noticed before.

“This,” Patrick continued, and he put a hand on Paul’s shoulder, “is your nephew. I can never be your father, but I can be your brother and we can be your family, for now and forever.”

The Boy refused to believe. It was too confusing for him to deal with. He backed away, loudly declaring, “No! You’re lying! I know what I know, and I don’t need to know any more than that!”

“You’re sounding more like an adult already,” Paul commented.

“Come back! Please!” Patrick said, and he reached for his big brother, but his grasp came up short. The Boy bounded back, off the ledge and hung in the air, and he said, “I’m always going to remain exactly the way I am! Always and always, and you can never change that no matter what lies you tell me and excuses you make! Never! Never ever!”

The Boy spun in the air then and arched himself skyward. Patrick went to the window, and as loudly as he could, said, “You will always be welcome here, and the window will always remain unlocked for you, my brother! Always!”

He kept repeating that, long after The Boy was out of sight. Patrick sagged against the windowsill then, and Paul thought that tears were welling in his eyes. But he quickly wiped them away.

“Father,” Paul whispered, “did I—did I handle things in a grown-up enough way?”

His father laughed, although it sounded like a choked and saddened laugh, and he said, “You know what, Paul? Even when you’re all grown-up…as long as you have parents, you’re never really grown up, because you’ve got parents who will always think of you as their little boy. That’s what my—what The Boy—doesn’t understand. He could have everything…be a grown-up and child all at the same time. But maybe he’ll realize that someday.”

And as Mary cooed in the arms of her new mother, a small bird chirped brightly out on a tree branch and then flapped away.

Paul’s family never moved out of the house. Patrick bequeathed the house to Paul and his adopted sister, and even though they each went out and started families, inevitably the families returned to live there. There Paul and Mary remained until the end of their days, leaving it to their children in turn. (Although it should be noted that Paul continued to have adventures all the way into adulthood, because once adventure knows your name—especially when your name is Tigerheart—it tends to call on you whenever it sees fit. Perhaps we will tell you of those further adventures someday. It depends upon whether you behave yourself or not. It’s up to you.)

Their upstairs window was never ever barred, because they always hoped that one day a young boy who refuses to grow up will return home. At that point, he would be tended to and loved and helped to grow up, so that he would no longer be unique and special, but merely another adult. And so it will always be for as long as adults are naive and hopeful and childish.

Acknowledgments

Although he was mentioned in the dedication, we cannot emphasize enough the debt owed to the works of James Barrie…not only for
Peter and Wendy
but also for
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.
It begs the question why we did not just call The Boy “Peter Pan,” particularly since Peter and company have fallen into public domain, thus removing any legal barriers. The reason is simple: The story is really Paul Dear’s story. His quest, his ambitions, and his character development are what drive the book. And Peter Pan, quite the arrogant and saucy fellow that he is, wouldn’t deign to be associated with any story in which he is not the prime mover and shaker. So as this story developed, Peter bowed out and The Boy bowed in. We are sure that you will see the resemblances in the end, although we suspect that Peter and The Boy would look at each other sideways and crossways and see no likenesses whatsoever. Ultimately, we suppose that if literary pastiche is good enough for August Derleth and Philip José Farmer, it’s good enough for us.

Nevertheless, as a result of our indebtedness to the source material, a percentage of royalties for this book will be donated to the Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, to which Barrie left the original copyright lo those many years ago.

We wish to thank the individuals who got this book into print: our agent, Matt Bialer; our editor, Betsy Mitchell, who never lost faith in the title (in several senses of the word); and her assistant, Kaitlin Heller, who offered a number of very useful suggestions to improve the manuscript. And of course my wife, Kathleen, who remains my first and best source of commentary and critique.

And lastly, again we acknowledge Ariel David, who read the manuscript and dubbed Paul “Tigerheart” before the book ever called him that. He remains flattered by the name and will strive mightily to live up to it.